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Saturday, May 10, 2014

The Babel Generator

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Les Perelman, a former director of undergraduate writing at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sits in his wife’s office and
reads aloud from his latest essay. "Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded,
precarious, and decent," he reads. "Humankind will always subjugate
privateness." Not exactly E.B. White. Then again, Mr. Perelman wrote the essay in
less than one second, using the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language
Generator, or Babel, a new piece of weaponry in his continuing war on
automated essay-grading software.

The Babel generator, which Mr. Perelman built with a team of students
from MIT and Harvard University, can generate essays from scratch using
as many as three keywords. For this essay, Mr. Perelman has entered only one keyword: "privacy."
With the click of a button, the program produced a string of bloated
sentences that, though grammatically correct and structurally sound,
have no coherent meaning. Not to humans, anyway. But Mr. Perelman is not
trying to impress humans. He is trying to fool machines...

Mr. Perelman’s fundamental problem with essay-grading automatons, he
explains, is that they "are not measuring any of the real constructs
that have to do with writing." They cannot read meaning, and they cannot
check facts. More to the point, they cannot tell gibberish from lucid
writing. He has spent the past decade finding new ways to make that point, and
the Babel Generator is arguably his cleverest stunt to date...